Although industrial and commercial equipment manufacturers have developed new and innovative equipment for managing, monitoring and controlling remotely-distributed industrial equipment and machine controllers, significant difficulties remain in the seamless integration of available wireless technology into industrial equipment. For instance, remotely distributed vending machines are sometimes interfaced with a central data and control center to monitor and control inventory. Wireless communications are one possible way of transmitting vending machine information from remote locations. However, fragmented communication networks provide a challenge for incorporating wireless communication into remotely located systems. More specifically, different geographical locations employ different wireless communication networks. Thus it is difficult to deploy wireless communications systems that are reliably interfaced with a wireless network in a given geographical location. There simply is not a cost effective wireless system uniformly available throughout the United States.
One possible solution is to provide wireless communications as an add-on package external to the industrial equipment. However, integration of add-on wireless communications with the industrial equipment tends to increase costs compared with integration of wireless communications into the industrial equipment. Further, the difficulty of deploying compatible wireless communications is compounded where the communications system is integrated into industrial machine controllers, such as vending machine controllers, at the time of manufacture of the industrial machine. For instance, if a vending machine is built with a given wireless system, the cost of shipping the vending machine is wasted if the wireless systems proves incompatible or unreliable at the destination location. Although the vending machine may be built with multiple wireless communication systems, this increases the expense of the design and configuration of specific systems and may lead to delay in production of such systems.
Another difficulty associated with deploying wireless systems is that multiple systems often work in a given geographical area with one wireless system preferable over the other available systems. For example, two wireless networks may be available for communicating information in a given location. However, one of the networks may have a stronger signal based on the position or location of the system within a building or structure. If a system is designed to communicate with the weaker network, the system's performance may be reduced compared with the performance available were the system able to interact with the other wireless network having a stronger signal.